It's certainly possible to develop on a Windows machine, in fact, my first application was exclusively developed on the old Dell Precision I had at the time :)
There are three routes;
- Install OSx86 (aka iATKOS / Kalyway) on a second partition/disk and dual boot.
- Run Mac OS X Server under VMWare (Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) onwards, read the update below).
- Use Delphi XE4 and the macincloud service. This is a commercial toolset, but the component and lib support is growing.
The first route requires modifying (or using a pre-modified) image of Leopard that can be installed on a regular PC. This is not as hard as you would think, although your success/effort ratio will depend upon how closely the hardware in your PC matches that in Mac hardware - e.g. if you're running a Core 2 Duo on an Intel Motherboard, with an NVidia graphics card you are laughing. If you're running an AMD machine or something without SSE3 it gets a little more involved.
If you purchase (or already own) a version of Leopard then this is a gray area since the Leopard EULA states you may only run it on an "Apple Labeled" machine. As many point out if you stick an Apple sticker on your PC you're probably covered.
The second option is more costly. The EULA for the workstation version of Leopard prevents it from being run under emulation and as a result, there's no support in VMWare for this. Leopard server, however, CAN be run under emulation and can be used for desktop purposes. Leopard server and VMWare are expensive, however.
If you're interested in option 1) I would suggest starting at Insanelymac and reading the OSx86 sections.
I do think you should consider whether the time you will invest is going to be worth the money you will save though. It was for me because I enjoy tinkering with this type of stuff and I started during the early iPhone betas, months before their App Store became available.
Alternatively, you could pick up a low-spec Mac Mini from eBay. You don't need much horsepower to run the SDK and you can always sell it on later if you decide to stop development or buy a better Mac.
Update: You cannot create a Mac OS X Client virtual machine for OS X 10.6 and earlier. Apple does not allow these Client OSes to be virtualized. With Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) onwards, Apple has changed its licensing agreement in regards to virtualization. Source: VMWare KnowledgeBase
The error handling direction that Apple has been taking since 1.4 has been NSError for errors that the application should know about (like the one you stated above) and exceptions for programming errors (that should never get past QA).
In general, you should program with these guidelines in mind. When you find an issue like this, you can program a handler for now based on the actual results you are finding, but you should also post a bug report to Apple right away since this pattern is contrary to the one they're adopting.
You can post the bug report to http://bugreport.apple.com/. You will need an ADC account but you can post bug reports with the free account. I've found them to be extremely responsive to bugs in the development toolkit and issues like this, where the framework behaves contradictory to their stated design patterns.
Best Answer
No one is going to show you production code because it depends 100% on your application and where the error occurs.
Personally, I put an assert statement in there because 99.9% of the time this error is going to occur in development and when you fix it there it is highly unlikely you will see it in production.
After the assert I would present an alert to the user, let them know an unrecoverable error occurred and that the application is going to exit. You can also put a blurb in there asking them to contact the developer so that you can hopefully track this done.
After that I would leave the abort() in there as it will "crash" the app and generate a stack trace that you can hopefully use later to track down the issue.